The eclectic nature of the first season at Nicholases Hytner and Starr’s Bridge Theatre is admirable. The political farce Young Marx opened the venue last autumn, followed in turn by a star-studded, promenade Julius Caesar, then the intimate rural family drama Nightfall by up-and-coming Barney Norris, and now a solo performance adapted from a recent literary novel.

Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 work is not a book in which things happen, but rather one in which characters emerge through accretion of details and recollections. When the eponymous Lucy is hospitalised for several weeks in New York City following surgical complications, her mother visits from backwoods Illinois. It is the first time the two have met, or spoken almost, in years; gradually a portrait builds up of Lucy, how she arrived where she is today, and of her family in general and (as she says) “how our roots are so tenaciously twisted around one another’s hearts”. Rona Munro rightly resists all temptation to open matters up in her adaptation; the purity is impressive of not even having a second actor onstage, but leaving Laura Linney as Lucy to embark on sustained impersonations of her mother.

Linney, too, avoids any particle of histrionics; she simply moves, unfussy and unforced, around the stage which is bare but for a hospital bed and a visitor’s armchair, with a succession of back-projected locations. I do worry, though, that this is where Richard Eyre’s production may become too discreet: Linney subtly “cheats” to either side during some of her narrations, but not, I think, enough to stop some members of this three-sided audience from  having to read her shoulder-blade as much as her face.

Strout’s writing is so disciplined in its modesty that she manages in the course of this 90-minute piece to mention both the 1980s first wave of AIDS cases and the 9/11 World Trade Center attack without either making a remotely big deal of either or seeming to trivialise them; they are simply elements which contribute to the whole that is Lucy. Even the programme for the production, rather than commissioning scholarly essays on some aspect or other, simply reproduces one of the stories from the second Lucy Barton book, Anything Is Possible.

Written for the Financial Times.